Benito Mussolini 3

 

For some time after his return, little was heard of him. He once more became a schoolmaster, this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so he confessed, a life of "moral deterioration." But soon tiring of such a wasteful life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism, and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment.

During a period of freedom in 1909, he fell in love with 16-year-old Rachele Guidi, the younger of the two daughters of his father’s widowed mistress; she went to live with him in a damp, cramped apartment in Forl and later married him. Soon after the marriage, Mussolini was imprisoned for the fifth time, but by then, Comrade Mussolini had become recognized as one of the most gifted and dangerous of Italy’s younger socialists. After writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper of his own, La Lotta di Classe . So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper,Avanti!, whose circulation he soon doubled, and as its antimilitarist, antinationalist, and anti-imperialist editor, he thunderously opposed Italy’s intervention in World War I.